Retina Disply Ramifications

With the transition into the Retina Display Era, I was contemplating the cascading implications, which I hope the forum will shed some light on. My strength lies in imaging, editing and story telling and not so much in the deep technical realm that lives “inside the box” so guidance in this area would be appreciated.

Certain image sizes and resolutions have become standard over the years such as creating screen images at 72 or 96ppi and small manageable videos like 640 x 480 for SD and 640 x 360 for HD, all of which can be more easily transmitted and shared with even email.

Will there now be a need to increase the pixel density on stills for example in order to obtain a reasonable sized, non pixilated image on these new 220ppi + or – displays?

How will this impact the perceived image size and quality of the smaller draft or proof sized videos?

As we move more and more away from the physical to the meta-physical with the cloud phenomenon
won’t file sizes and possibly data rates have to increase in order to keep up with the higher resolutions,
which impacts and adds stress on the pipelines to the sky?

With video, I don't generally think in PPI or DPI -- those numbers are only meaningful if you know both the pixel count and the display size, and display size isn't a factor in most video production (though it certainly does impact large-format and theatrical work).

It's usually better to think it terms of pixels only. If you want the sharpest possible imagery on a retina display, you'll have to get as close as 1:1 in pixels (from source to display) as possible -- just like any other video device.

[Walter Soyka]" If you want the sharpest possible imagery on a retina display, you'll have to get as close as 1:1 in pixels (from source to display) as possible -- just like any other video device."
Which means that any picture displayed at full quality (1:1) will look smaller on a Retina display than on a non-Retina display of the same size. Isn't it?
Then I guess that when editing something smaller than 1280x720 will be necessary to set the canvass bigger than 100%.
rafael

AnandTech has a review on the Retina running Windows 7 and 8 that shows the display in 8 scaled 100, 125, and 150 percent that can be displayed at original size as well as fit to browser window. Looks very sharp at all scalings. Here is the link to the display grabs, you can back track for the review. http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2080#1

Looking at the screen captures in the AnandTech galleries for the Macbook Pro Retina, it does look like it’s capturing pixel-doubled data. I took the screen capture for the 1280x800 option and at actual size displayed on my 27” iMac, the image filled my screen for the width and exceeded by height (iMac at 2560x1440). That is still understandable in the sense that the Retina screen has 2880x1800 physical pixels. What surprised me was when I looked at the screen capture for the 1920x1080 option on the Retina display. On my iMac I could only see a portion of the screen because it appeared the screen capture was 3840x2160 pixels; that’s more than the physical pixels on the Retina display! This conclusion was also supported by a post in Apple’s Discussion forum on the Macbook Pro, which said all screen captures are pixel doubled the virtual screen size defined in System Preferences/Display panel. So that 1920x1080 is pixel-doubled internally in the graphic chips to 3840x2160 and then scaled back to fit the 2880x1800 physical limitation of the Retina display. Now it’s all making sense what Apple’s doing.

Still individual applications like Aperture and Final Cut Pro X 10.0.5 are not being pixel-doubled when they are displaying the photo or video imagery. That stuff is true pixel-for-pixel if you select to display the graphic as ‘actual size’ within those applications. I think I can rest now... been reading this stuff for many hours. And in spite of all that reading on one has mentioned how Quicktime behaves... hope it’s like Aperture and FCPX but eerie no one cares. I did read that Apple’s Preview application is also 'Retina ready’ and it’s graphic imagery is also pixel-for-pixel. I’ll post later when I learn about Quicktime.

Sorry I forgot to post after Dave Jenkins confirmed that QuickTime does display pixel-for-pixel video. So if you open a HD video and display it at actual size, it does use 1920x1080 pixels on the screen out of the 2880x1800 available pixels. A screen grab of the contents will result in a capture of 1920x1080 pixels. Hopefully you already saw this posted in a couple if other recent threads.

Certainly it can take more effort to drive the retina display than the non-retina display but in the following benchmark results, the Macbook Pro with Retina display does not seem to be suffering when compared to the traditionally designed Macbook Pro at comparable CPU/GPU speeds. For the processing of large files, the SSD is going to perform better than HDD-based system. AnandTech has done some benchmarks of various SSDs by the way and is favourably impressed with the choices Apple’s made for their machine:

If the Retina machine’s ports (no Firewire and Ethernet support without using an adapter) suit your purposes and the cost is not prohibitive, I’d certainly go with the Retina display model since overall it does seem to be the better performer. Although the GPU speeds are the same, I’d recommend the 1 GB GDDR5 GPU memory option on either machine. Take a look at these comparisons: